On 9/20/07, Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz> wrote:
> I'm not talking about moving disassembled code into our code. That is a
> copyright violation in Israel too. I'm talking about disassembling code
> in order to figure out what it does, and then reimplementing that (with
> or without going into the extremes of "clean room").
(Again, I am not a lawyer.) I think this is legal in the US *only*
when applied to interfaces, not to innards.
> Do the RoS guys do the former?
For their official policy, see
http://www.reactos.org/en/dev_legalreview.html
But also see
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/TinyKRNL
Here's the problem with accepting code from ReactOS:
they share code and developers with the TinyKRNL project
(the two projects were the same originally, and split apart
only after the world noticed just how illegal ReactOS's practices were).
TinyKRNL's official policy is "anything goes", so it wouldn't surprise
me if people on that project simply retyped stuff they saw in
stolen copies of the real Microsoft Windows source code.
ReachOS's official policy says in effect
"there's no such thing as a tainted developer,
so all TinyKRNL developers are welcome to submit code to ReactOS;
and any not-obviously-problematic code in TinyKRNL can be imported
into ReactOS."
While the above is a crass oversimplification, and I'm sure the ReactOS
people will want to correct any errors I made in it, it seems clear to me
that the fig leaf ReactOS is standing behind is a bit too small for
comfort. Wine does well to steer clear of ReactOS code.
We've gone over this about a dozen times. Can we get back to
programming Wine now (cleanly)?
- Dan